Cutting The Budget

A Lot Of Talk, Little Action

A Lot Of Talk, Little Action On Cutting State Budget

Much Talk, Little Action On Budget Cuts

Just about everybody wants to do it. The public opinion polls show that, and always have. People prove those polls right every day, in chats over coffee at work and around the dinner table at home.

FOR THE RECORD - The cost of caring for a retarded person in a group home ranges from $89,000 to $126,000 a year, depending on the type of home. The lower figure was incorrect in a Page 1 story Sunday... Also, The state edicaid budget has grown at 2.8 times the rate of growth of the rest of state spending since 1972. The first story in The Courant's series on state spending said Medicaid growth was triple that of the rest of the budget. It should have said nearly triple. The

Nobody knows the public mood on this issue better than the politicians. Just check out those campaign leaflets every two years, and see how many candidates for legislative seats promise to cut spending.

Lots of people win election that way, which means the General Assembly always is filled with people who've said they want to cut spending.

And every year, they vote to increase spending.

This is the great paradox of politics in Connecticut, and of state politics across the nation.

It's reminiscent of that old joke about the weather: Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it.

Why?

That's a question being asked more often now that Connecticut has a new income tax to pay for much of the spending that the public says it does not want.

A common answer is that the legislature is manipulated by special-interest groups that benefit from state programs.

This view also holds that the beneficiaries of state programs are, by and large, not the taxpayers; that most programs are either unneces sary or bigger than necessary; and that government, by nature, is so poorly managed that much of its spending is wasted.

Therefore, the argument goes, cutting state spending should be easy. It just takes guts. Only the special interests would be hurt.

That might make for a rousing speech, and there are elements of truth to all the underlying assumptions.

But if it really were that easy, would all 187 legislators, at one time or another, have risked their political futures last summer by voting for $1 billion in tax increases? Not likely. They would have cut the budget by $1 billion instead.

The truth is that cutting spending is hard to do -- a lot harder than raising taxes. Harder even than enacting an income tax.

It's hard because the programs financed by the state budget affect an enormous number of people, not just a few narrowly defined groups, such as state employees or welfare recipients.

And it's hard because making big cuts in these programs would have consequences the politicians believe would displease their constituents, despite those constituents' clamor for cuts.

"The polls show we want to spend less money," said Gardner E. Wright Jr., a former state representative who was co-chairman of the legislature's appropriations committee. "They don't say we want to cut any programs. They don't say we want to cut any services."

Indeed, a new Courant/Connecticut poll -- done especially for this series of articles -- shows that although almost 80 percent of state residents believe spending is "too high," few people support major cutting in any category of state spending.

Henry J. Becker Jr., Republican state auditor, said the public demand for spending cuts is basically selfish.

"They're for cuts unless the cuts affect them. If they're affected, they want the cuts somewhere else," he said.

The recent special legislative session revealed a lot about the political realities of trying to cut spending.

Many legislators had promised for weeks to give the public what they said it wanted: spending cuts in lieu of a state income tax.

Yet what they delivered were mostly other ways of raising revenue, mostly through other kinds of taxes. Was the public clamoring for that? No.

Real spending cuts amounted to only $30 million of the $1.6 billion in proposals to balance the budget without an income tax.

Why didn't these self-described budget cutters keep their promise?

Some said it was because the fiscal year was almost half over, making deep spending cuts much harder to achieve. But that hardly explains their weak showing, as most of the budget -- more than $4 billion -- had not been spent when they began trying to cut it.

A more credible explanation is that they did not want to go on record in support of cutting programs that affect large numbers of voters.

With so many of their constituents believing that cutting spending is painless, the anti-income tax legislators didn't want to be the ones to shatter the myth.

Next month, however, the issue might not be so easy to duck, as the legislature will begin work on a budget for 1992-93.

An early estimate shows the $7.64 billion budget for 1991-92 would have to be increased by $1 billion to deliver all the

services required by current state law.

But after all their talk about spending cuts, a majority of lawmakers will have difficulty explaining to their constituents any increase from this year's bottom line.

Michael Levin, vice president of the Connecticut Policy and Economic Council, has made a career of seeking ways to cut government spending.